Moira Donegan

  • Culture July 2, 2024

    “IF YOU WANT A HAPPY ENDING,” Orson Welles once quipped, “that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” But sometimes, it’s not that the story stops so much as that the audience stops paying attention. This might be one way to think of #MeToo, which, in the years since it has faded from […]
  • *Illustration from _Woman’s Day Magazine_ (February 1957).*
    Culture April 9, 2024

    SOMETIMES WHAT CONSERVATIVES SEEM TO FEAR MOST from liberals is not their money or their ideology but their judgment. Beneath the vast tide of right-wing grievance, there is a current of profound insecurity, a suspicion that liberals don’t think conservatives are good enough. There is nothing they desire more than the sight of a liberal humbled into seeing the light. To cater to this desire, the media has produced a peculiar new kind of pundit: the conservative who pretends to be a liberal—one agreeing, in spite of themselves, with the conservatives.